Sky’s the limit with Azure, ASP.NET Core, and Visual Studio for Mac

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Cloud services represent a huge leap in functionality, performance, and management simplicity for web apps, APIs, mobile backends, and more. To help you get started with cloud-based development in Visual Studio for Mac, today we’re publishing two new hands-on labs: publishing your ASP.NET Core web app to Azure, and connecting your ASP.NET Core web app to Azure SQL Database.

These two labs will help develop cloud-ready ASP.NET web apps and APIs with Visual Studio for Mac, using an Azure hosted SQL database, and then publish the web app itself to Azure. What’s more, you can try Azure out for free!

Lab 7: Publishing ASP.NET Core websites to Azure

This lab builds on the earlier Getting Started with ASP.NET Core lab, by showing you how to publish the website to Azure using Visual Studio for Mac in just a few steps:

Lab 8: Using Azure SQL Database in ASP.NET Core web apps

Every website needs a database. It is easy to set up an Azure SQL database to connect and develop locally on Visual Studio for Mac and migrate it to a production instance later. This lab will walk you through getting your first cloud database and ASP.NET Core web app up and running:

Creating an Azure SQL Database

Setting up the ASP.NET Core app

Configuring the SQL Azure Database

Connecting the ASP.NET Core website to Azure SQL

These step-by-step instructions will show you how to set up and connect to the Azure database from ASP.NET Core. The same steps will work for ASP.NET Core web API projects, which you can use as a mobile app back-end.

Visual Studio for Mac, version 7.3

On December 4, we released Visual Studio for Mac, version 7.3, bringing an even better Visual Studio for Mac to you as a free update. This release brings performance and stability enhancements, as well as new features. Visual Studio Test Platform (VSTest) now provides more flexibility in choosing your test frameworks and automatic iOS app signing, reducing the number of manual steps needed to build your app. Check out the full blog post for more details and be sure to download or update to Visual Studio for Mac, version 7.3 today!